


An apple a day

by marysrose



Category: Vampyr (Video Game), Vampyr - Fandom
Genre: Child Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-06-25 14:36:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15642753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marysrose/pseuds/marysrose
Summary: All little Jonathan wanted was to have a simple game of tag. But what is a little boy to do when a simple playground game soon twists to a game of life and death? Mother and father can't save him now...





	An apple a day

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to get rid of as many mistakes in this as I could, but if some still remain, my apologies!

The world was a spinning top, a sea of twists and turns as little Jonathan faded gradually into the scene before him, colour slowly leeching into his rounded face as he became less of an apparition and more of a human being.  
  
“Come on, slowpoke! Catch me if you can!”

Voices -- yes -- voices, he heard them now, remembered something he had to do.. Something important.  
  
His sister...  
  
Playing tag, of course!  Pitter-patter of little feet, giggles exploding out from the heavens, assaulting him from every angle, every direction, every compass point… All overtaken by the thunderstorm of laughter, raining down upon him.  
  
“Coming, Mary!”  
  
The young boy chimed happily, turning on his expensively clad heels with a loud _screech_ as he set off for the game of his lifetime.  
  
**CRASH!!**  
  
Hot oceans brimming within naive eyes, Jonathan nursed his now injured knee as he lay, half-collapsed, a broken animal on the floor. Windows to his soul flitting desperately around him as he yearned for the source of his aggressor, where the water runs true, Jonathan felt himself transition from soul to statue as his eyes followed the shape before him, up and up…  
  
Up and up and up and up...  
  
Until finally, he was rewarded with the sight of the face of a rather official looking man composed entirely of white and grey -- grey, the slicked back crown that framed his furrowed features, white, the colour that nearly completely encompassed the towering creature, white shoes, white coat, white trousers…  
  
And suddenly he’s on his knees, again, screaming in agony, pain he has never felt before, pain mother can’t kiss better, he thinks, but it’s sort of calming, he thinks again, **yes** , _calming_ , as his cranium screams and an image projects into his mind, a particularly intriguing image, that of a winged staff encircled by the grips of two spiralled serpents.  
  
As soon as the vision appeared it is gone, leaving reality to smoulder back into the wildfires around him. Still, the strange man stands, tapping at his forearm as if he has something of the utmost importance to attend to - just as he must have been doing when he collided into Jonathan, it dawns on him, and suddenly everything mother taught him about manners comes flooding back to him.  
  
Apologies and introductions had better come soon, or he would surely be expecting a slap on the wrist upon his arrival home -- courtesy of mother, and his snitch of a sister who would gladly throw him into the jury’s wake.. Naturally. But would any of that quell their unwavering familial love? No, not one bit.  
  
“W-wait.. Sir... I’m sorry, have we met before?”  
A mouse's voice stutters out, the young boy silently berating himself for sounding such a baby. After what feels like centuries, the breathing mystery in front of him finally lifts his weathered head, an impression of a frown playing at his lips.  
  
“Sir..?”  
  
He slumps, having lost the walking query to the perils of the tick-tick-tick-ticking seemingly wired into its brain _yet again_ …  
  
But suddenly! A miracle happens… The official looking man looks Jonathan right in the eye, one eyebrow perking up as Jonathan feels a strange texture pressed into his chubby hands. Awestruck eyes looking as though they’ve just unearthed some great treasure, he feels his mind flood with questions as he holds up the bandage the man has just pushed into his grasp.

Jonathan identifies what he believes to be the attempt of a _smile_ forming on chapped lips, but he must have been dreaming, for when he looks to the man again, he simply nods and points to the exposed vermillion gushing forth from the young boy’s knee.

Realizing the man has become succumbed to the tick-tick-tick-ticking once more, Jonathan quickly opens his mouth, words forming on his lips, but like a goldfish, he is left mute, mouth opening and closing but no sound daring to force its way through....

The man… He’s gone.  
  
_Forever?_

Crushing _a thousand_ unanswered questions to **dus** t beneath his fancy shoes.  
  
“Johnny, have you fallen asleep?! I’m getting _boo-oo-ored_ , come catch me already! Mother said you _have_ to follow the rules this time!”  
  
A bullet fired back into the naive little trivialities of this poisoned earth, little Johnny is reminded of the sole reason he ventured into this winding maze in the first place. A game of tag. Right. Off to catch Mary…  
  
Finally.  
  
So, our young protagonist skips on to brave this twisting labyrinth, shaking away the perplexing happenings of his not so distant past.

But, alas…

Something is amiss.

Voices - voices _again_ \-- flitting like disturbed bats, swarming him like the bees that enveloped him and Mary the time they got just a little _too_ curious about the buzzing beehive in the park.  
  
But father wasn’t here to protect him this time. Oh, _no._

All the voices, _every single voice in the world,_ the silenced, the quiet, the loud, the voiceless, the _dead_ , the symbol burning in his head…  
  
_Come hither, Johnny… Come hither…_

Walls falling in on each other, paths merging into one and back to two again…

Mary! Mary, right up ahead, a single arm on her hip as she pouts as she does when scolded.

“Well?”

But _the man_ , the man, there he is again. One finger held in beckoning to him, lips mouthing to the same damned command…

 _Come hither, Johnny… Come hither…_  
  
And he feels like a warped imitation of one of him and Mary’s toys, the one game that Mary never failed to beat him at.. The cup-and-ball, the bane of his dignity as he watched his sister get the ball suspended by string into that cup again and again and again and again, meanwhile, his cup remained forever empty. But Jonathan wasn’t the empty cup, he was the ball held captive by a single thread, swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,  _backandforthbackandforthbackandforth **BACKANDFORTHBACKANDFORTHBACKANDFOR--**_

MARY! Of course, it was always Mary, why would it be anyone else?!

Run, run, run! The young boy sprints, faster than sound, faster than light, _faster than the voices,_ slicing through the veil, skidding on his knees to what was always going to be his one and only destination--

By his siblings side.

“Tag, you’re i---”

Jonathan begins to say, but the sight that greets him is in no way welcoming. The walking query is here again, but this time, with an answer.

An answer that Jonathan _never_ wanted to hear, not in his entire lifetime.

The man composed entirely of grey and white is stood over his sister’s tiny, frail form, two fingers at her wrist.

The man composed entirely of grey and white shatters his entire world apart as he looks at him with sad eyes -- emotion, you show emotion only _now?_  -- shaking his head “no.”

“M-Mary… G-get up Mary, mother will be expecting us home soon and if we don’t get home in time to get all of those stains out of your dress-- and--- what are those? Why is there r--.. Re--...”

The no longer naive little boy falls in a heap before the lifeless shape of his kid sister.

“H-Hey.. Mary… Your marbles.. I never returned them to you, I promised you that I would.. So wake up.. And I’ll give you your marbles that you were supposed to show off to all your friends at school. And you can tell mother, and all your friends at school what a no-good-stealing big brother you have -- and I’ll let you tell everybody that you’re the older twin, and we can play conkers together like you keep saying you always wanted to do and -- and--”

“Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuh!”

“Mary?!”  
  
Fingertips of ice vicing down onto his wrist, Jonathan watches in awe as his supposedly dead sister forces a foreign object into his hands.

An.. Apple?

“Wait, Mary! What does this mean?!”  
  
With a blink of an eye, his younger sibling collapses to the floor one final time, a rag doll once again.  
  
Eyeing the fruit in his palms, Jonathan battles the tears in his eyes as he tries to make sense of why the colour of this apple means something to him - red.. The colour of Mary’s favourite flower.

No, not that…

Something deeper. But _what?_ He feels like he’s forgetting something extremely important, but he just can’t put his finger on it…

But what does it matter, anyway? Mary’s gone. _Nothing_ matters anymore. But, no, she’s not! This is just a sick joke! A sick joke that he, Mary and mother will all laugh about together in the future, telling Jonathan how silly he is for falling for it, how he should have seen his face.

Feeling a stirring behind him, the broken boy turns, and again, he feels his whole world dissolve into horror.

For there before him stands.. _Himself._

The man composed only of grey and white, but those aren’t the only colours now, oh _no_ , now the man is almost completely **red** , red, red, red…

And his _face_ , it’s different, it seems to have contorted, changed completely, not a nice-looking gentleman now, but a both younger yet older man with a forest of a face and hellfire captivated within his eyes, the very pits of the night chained to that merciless death stare…

Eyes that look frighteningly familiar.

Is that..The _devil?_

Go, go, go!

The creature with a face so familiar yet so unrecognizable races after him, shouting unintelligible things at him, no, **HISSING** at him, **GROWLING** at him, and he’s running, and he’s running, and he’s running, and he…

  
Stops.

Turns around.

 “Sir…”  


 “My Mary, please. I have something to give her, you have to promise to give it to her. “  
He presses a kiss into his palm, balls his fist.

“For the pain… Mother always gives us magic kisses when we are sick or hurt and we always feel better. But I don’t need them now… Because I don’t matter. Only Mary matters, and if it takes all the magic kisses in the world to fix her, then so be it.”

The creature stops advancing for a second. Brows furrowing, fangs baring.

Not-so-naive Jonathan looks up to the night sky falling down upon them, looks to his audience of the stars.

“See up there?” He points, pinpointing a certain constellation.  
“That’s Cygnus. Bound to protect my Mary - our Mary, sir, if I’m not mistaken, because I suspect that we know each other a lot more than you care to admit…”  
  
A growl.  
  
“They’re all dead.” The creature utters in the same mouse-like voice that Jonathan spoke in when he banged into the strange man what seems like years ago now.

“The stars, sir?”

He doesn’t reply.


End file.
